


Just Another Day

by flugantamuso



Category: X Files
Genre: Gen, Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-10
Updated: 2010-01-10
Packaged: 2017-10-06 03:14:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/49067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flugantamuso/pseuds/flugantamuso
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Trouble comes in threes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Just Another Day

There was a lot of water. Not the rushing torrents that the word 'flood' implied, perhaps, but puddles which became larger puddles, which became small ponds. Scully detoured around one to enter FBI headquarters. Sadly even the detouring only put her in four inches of water rather than twelve.

It was one of those days.

The rain had started three weeks ago. It was supposed to last four or five hours. It rained for seven hours, stopped for two, and started again. It had been intermittent since, never stopping for more than a few hours at a time. It was as if the skies had a limitless amount of water to pour down on the earth, and even though it wasn't doing any real damage, not in this part of the country anyway, it left everyone surly, irritable and perpetually damp. It also meant that high-top boot had a surge in popularity.

Scully had regrettably neglected to get a pair in the first few days, and by the time she got around to it the only thing she could find in her size were bright pink moonboots. The first time she'd broken down and worn them to work, after ruining four pairs of perfectly good tennies and two pair of pumps, Mulder had almost split his head open on the floor when he fell down laughing. Mulder was in constant good humor these days. As everyone else got grimmer he became almost aggressively happy. For once Scully was glad that they worked in the basement where the chances of offending someone went down considerably, the only creatures there to offend being spiders and centipedes.

Their case load, unlike those of the rest of the force (even criminals slow down in four feet of water) had not significantly decreased. Rather, they’d gotten stranger. Their current case was simple enough at the outset, grave robbing ("zombies, vampires, necrophilia!" said Mulder. "The victim was 88, Mulder!"), or rather, morgue robbing. Scully thought that someone was stealing the bodies for medical purposes, although again, 88 years old. Mulder, predictably, was thinking along rather different lines.

"A ritualistic cult, or maybe spontaneous combustion."

"Then shouldn't we be looking for little piles of ash?"

Neither of them had anything solid to base their theories on, which was why Scully was stuck doing autopsies while Mulder harassed--er, _questioned_ the relatives of the deceased.

She was doing a particularly tricky bit with the brain when the earthquake hit.

As she scrambled under the table she was thinking, ‘I didn’t even know there were any fault lines here,’ and then, ‘dammit, I’m ruining another skirt!’ because the floor, like everything else, was damp. The floor slowly stopped moving and she was cautiously considering getting up when it started up again, harder than before. There was a thud as the body she’d been working on slid to the floor. It rolled away from the table with the floppy ungainly motion of dead flesh being forcefully moved out of its natural position, and then, as the quakes intensified, rolled _toward_ it.

Scully had about two seconds to consider moving before she was pressed cheek to cheek with a cold wet body.

_It blinked at her._

She let out an undignified shriek and immediately rolled in the opposite direction, heedless of the flying equipment and body parts. By the time she was scrambling to her knees it was moving it’s arms and legs. There was a queer difference to the way that it moved now, as opposed to the way it had been moved by the quake. It had _purpose_.

‘Get a grip on yourself, Dana,’ she thought. ‘Zombie movies are not real. If that thing is actually alive then it probably needs help. You should see what you can do for it.’

She met it’s eyes. They were open, staring, and terribly blank.

She left the room and locked the door behind her.

Afterwards she leaned on the wall in a doorway, waiting for the shaking to stop and wiping intestines absentmindedly off her shoulder. ‘Bacterial viruses,’ she thought, ‘re-animation, zombies…..Mulder!’

ooo

Mulder was having no luck with the relatives. They spoke poor English, and he spoke poor Spanish, and the earthquake had put quit to their attempt at conversation. He was huddling under the kitchen table with an old woman muttering in Spanish and an old man who stank of garlic. He inched away from the old man, whose breath was truly terrible, only to inch back when a rolling pin threatened him from above.

He was groping for his cell phone when the howling began. He thought at first that they must have a dog, a dog shut up in the basement, and he crawled towards the door with the intention of letting the poor thing out, but the old woman grabbed at his legs with more strength than appearances dictated she have. He couldn’t understand her words, but her terrified grip convinced him that whatever it was in the basement could stay in the basement. He retreated to the table, where the old man was making the sign of the cross.

Across from them the door shuddered.

ooo

Mulder wasn’t eaten by zombies, or crushed by the earthquake, and he hadn’t even lost his phone, but Scully couldn’t quite understand his words over the static and noise of the quake. She managed to make out that he couldn’t understand his companions because they didn’t speak English, but he thought that they were trying to answer his questions about their son.

‘Just like Mulder,’ she thought, ‘to be worried about the investigation in the middle of an earthquake.’

ooo

The basement door was giving way. The old man was pointing at it and screaming, as if that would do any good. Mulder was sorely tempted to stay and see what the thing was, but the old woman was dragging him by one arm and the old man by the other. The three of them were moving at a slow and jerky pace towards the door, sliding as the floor shuddered.

They were braced in the frame of the kitchen door when an arm broke through the basement door. It was white on the top and pink on the bottom, and its nails were torn but not bloody.

ooo

Scully lost the connection with Mulder after thirty seconds of broken conversation. She put her phone away in exasperation and stood up. The quakes were only getting worse, but Mulder was in trouble. That is, he hadn’t _said_ that he was in trouble, but she didn’t trust him not to try to form a close acquaintance with a zombie, or...whatever it was.

Time to get moving. There was Mulder to save, zombies to face, and an earthquake to weather, not to mention the flood.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the apocalyptothon


End file.
